Abstract
This chapter (Sects. 3.1–3.14) introduces notions to do with the happening-ness of practices in intersubjective space. After Sect. 3.1, which suggests that practices are like passages through time, Sect. 3.2 contrasts the notion of intersubjectivity with the notion of subjectivity. Sections 3.2–3.5 then focus on the cultural-discursive dimension of intersubjectivity: semantic space. Sections 3.6–3.9 focus on the material dimension of intersubjectivity: physical or material space-time. Sections 3.10–3.13 focus on the social-political dimension of intersubjectivity: social space. This set of sections comes to a close with Sect. 3.14, about happening and intersubjectivity: the way happening in intersubjective space unfolds, everywhere and all at once, through time.
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Notes
- 1.
My much-missed wife Roslin Brennan Kemmis (Rozzie), who died in 2015, once had a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “How come they made up all the rules before I got here?”.
- 2.
I am grateful to Ted Schatzki and Nick Hopwood who, in reviewing the manuscript for this book, shared their hesitations about the concept of ‘intersubjectivity ’ as a key notion in the theory of practice architectures. Schatzki believes that the history of twentieth-century philosophy cautions against making the concept of ‘intersubjectivity’ central to a theory of practice or of social life, on the grounds that it yields misleading formulations about what seems literally implied by the term, namely, that it implies ‘between subject(ivitie)s’. He would prefer that I called the space in which people act, interact and carry on practices a ‘common world’ or ‘Common Space’ or ‘Public Space’, rather than ‘intersubjective space’, on the grounds that these would be better terms to use to describe this space. He also thinks it would be more compatible with a Wittgensteinian view of practices. He suggests instead a notion of ‘lives interrelatedly unfolding in a common world’. Schatzki recognises, however, that the term ‘intersubjective space’ has been central in my writings with colleagues over more than 10 years, and concedes that it might be acceptable if my colleagues and I intend that the term be understood in a looser, more encompassing way, to refer to the overlapping realms of semantic space, physical space-time and social space. This is indeed the way I understand and use the term.
- 3.
Thus, for example, a disposition like the authoritarian personality produces a person’s tyranny over subordinates (practices of tyranny) at the same time as it produces that person’s obsequious compliance to superordinates (practices of compliance). The authoritarian personality is one who has over-learned the power-over relations of hierarchy , often because, in the past, they have been bullied by a superordinate. Such a person all too readily manifests this super-sensitivity to hierarchy in steering through everyday life, usually (1) by bullying others (practices of bullying ), and (2) by trying to avoid being bullied by bosses, often by trying hard to please them, and to anticipate and fulfil their wishes, even before the bosses have expressed them (practices of compliance ).
- 4.
From New Revised Standard Version Bible (1989). National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America . http://bible.oremus.org/?passage=John+1:1–1:18&version=nrsv.
- 5.
We also know the world through our six senses in an embodied way—through the pain and pleasure, of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touch and proprioception (the sense of awareness of the position and movement of the body). We also know the world in a social sense, in terms of the pleasure and pain of positive and negative emotions and feelings like those of belonging (inclusion), caring, exclusion, power-over and power-with.
- 6.
Andre Dubus III is one such writer, as he reveals to Fassler (2013).
- 7.
I remember once visiting the city of Oviedo in Spain. I had settled into my hotel, and took a short walk in the streets nearby. Of course, I was in a hotel close to the University, and it was no surprise that there were bookshops. I paused before the window of one bookshop, and there, smack in the middle of the display, was a copy of Teoría Crítica de la Enseñanza: La investigación-acción en la formación del profesorado by Wilfred Carr y Stephen Kemmis . I am sure I glanced around me furtively to see if anyone recognised me looking so intently at the book I had written with Wilfred. But of course only a few individuals in Oviedo knew me. What struck me most on seeing the book there, however, was that I was the foreigner here. I was the illiterate one who could not read this Spanish text. I knew that the ideas and arguments we had written had become unmoored from our language , and now floated before me in another language. And I knew that we could not be sure what these ideas and arguments were, in translation , and that we could not know precisely how those translated ideas and arguments would be regarded or received by readers in that other language, culture, society, history.
- 8.
Shebang: an entire system (used in the phrase ‘the whole shebang’).
- 9.
In this context, it is impossible not to think about Australia’s domestic violence problem, which leads to the violent death of about one woman per week at the hands of a current or former intimate partner, and to an entirely understandable reluctance among abused women to report the violent behaviour of partners to the police, at the risk of attracting further violence. Practices of power have produced the men who do this violence; sometimes, practices of power have also produced the attraction of women to these men, and their practices of compliance that sometimes reproduce the tyrannical practices of the men who commit acts of violence against them. Of course, it remains true that, despite the attractions that lead women to these men, and the protective compliance they may display to avoid harm, they are not responsible for the violence done to them. The violence is entirely the responsibility of these men—although they may have endured violent role models whose practices in turn produced these men’s violent impulses and acts.
- 10.
I am grateful to Kathleen Mahon for some of the insights here about the practice tradition of lecturing, with its silencing of students, and the way the ‘sage on the stage’/‘guide on the side’ duality seems to be invoked by what Alex and Tyler are saying.
- 11.
We will return to the question of what is and is not possible in Sect. 5.1‘Practices at small scale ’.
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Kemmis, S. (2019). Practices Happen in Intersubjective Space. In: A Practice Sensibility. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9539-1_3
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